With so many factors playing into the conceptualization and production of a movie or TV series, it can be difficult for the average novice film producer or small marketing team to come up with ways to get new content in front of the right eyes. Having a vision for your project doesn’t necessarily mean that the optimal outcome you’ve envisioned is actually going to come into fruition by itself. With that said, here are four steps you can take to proactively promote an upcoming film project without spending an exuberant amount to do so.

Develop Promotional Media Content
Everyone knows the importance of creating a captivating trailer that makes the viewer say “oh, I’ve got to see that” but not everyone goes the extra step of leveraging other media types like infographics, GIFs, memes, behind-the-scenes footage, and slideshows. Even in a worst-case scenario, just about anybody should be able to create a slideshow from scratch and use it to highlight some of the more visually appealing moments of the project.

Launch a Content Distribution Campaign
Once you’ve got some good teaser content, it’s time to also delve into the linguistic side of film promotion – writing blog posts and publishing them on authoritative blogs to gain additional publicity. This step can be outsourced to a marketing or content creation agency, or you can take care of it independently if you’re confident in your writing skills and have the time to collaborate with blog owners to get your post submissions accepted.

Utilize Targeted Advertising
It goes without saying that everyone doesn’t want to see every movie. People have their preferences and trying to force them outside of those boundaries is not only rarely effective, it’s also a waste of your advertising budget. Fortunately, Facebook and Google make it easy to put your ads in front of very specific audiences with amazing demographic accuracy. Again, this is something that is normally taken care of by an agency, but for a smaller film production company, it can certainly be handled in-house if you’re willing to do the research.

Create a Strong Social Media Presence
Creating and maintaining active social media accounts is one additional step that every film production company should take to build brand awareness and reputability. Founding a group or page that has thousands of followers can help you establish a core of advocates who are enthusiastic about the content you’re releasing. That way, when you release more projects in the future, you’ll already have plenty of people looking forward to it and word of mouth will already be circulating.

Identifying and Appealing to an Audience
Ultimately, marketing any kind of visual content requires a multi-faceted approach that works best when all of the above strategies are incorporated into a coherent game plan. The big producers and networks have all of these bases covered, automated, and outsourced at the highest level, and it helps that their budgets are in the range of millions of dollars. Fortunately, with enough hard work and due diligence, even an independent film production company can make waves and win awards for their efforts.